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You can definitely mention it, just don't make the homepage all about gastric band hypnotherapy. The trouble comes when both pages are targeting the same phrase.

No, Google likes unique anchor text, since it seems more organic, and supports tracking codes as well. My only hesitation is that adding those tracking codes is going to identify your links as marketing efforts rather than completely organic links. But I think you should be okay.

The problem with tagging is that mysite.com/seo-text?utm_campaign=guest-blogs could technically be indexed by Google and become a duplicate of mysite.com/seo-text. Make sure that Google knows that you only want it to index mysite.com/seo-text by:

1. Adding a cannonical tag on the page to link to the non-parameter version:
2. Tell Google to disregard the utm_campaign parameter in Google Webmaster Tools.

Best,

Kristina

Yep, it should be /$A1$B1. Sorry about that!

On the Overview page in the Crawl Diagnostics box, click on Duplicate Page Title on the Y axis. It will send you to a page that lists the duplicate page titles.

Yep. I think that you need to select "Request URI" and then enter /$A$B (which is the same as above, but with a slash before it).

By the way, all of this info came from a great post I found: http://www.bigdaylight.com/analytics/filtering-subdomains-in-google-analytics/. You can also look there and check in the comments for other updates.

The picture that you showed tells Google to track the subdomain support.yoursite.com along with www.yoursite.com. However, if you have these two pages:

support.yoursite.com/your-product/

www.yoursite.com/your-product/

They will both be recorded as /your-product/ in the Google Analytics data. The (unfortunately very complicated) filter that I listed earlier is to add /subdomain/ in the folder structure, so that:

support.yoursite.com/your-product/ will be tracked as /support/your-product/

www.yoursite.com/your-product/ will be tracked as /your-product/

Is that a little clearer?

The way I recommended originally is to have one profile that has both your main domain and your subdomain mixed together, and the filter that I described would append the subdomain as a /folder/ in the URLs that Google is tracking. The filter should automatically populate that /folder/.

Best,

Kristina

Hi Liam,

I think that the same premise applies to meta title tags and keywords in general, so, yes, a good formula for a homepage title tag is: Brand - Core Business(es), even if the core business(es) have their own category pages.

You're right, if you turn a word on a page into an internal link, it shows the search engines that the destination page is targeted for that keyword. But again, I wouldn't worry about self competition unless you're actively targeting a keyword on two pages.

Best,

Kristina

Hi WMA,

Before I start, there are a couple of things you should keep in mind when looking at other websites for SEO tips:

1. Many websites aren't optimized for SEO (or, they're trying, but not 100% there)
2. Big companies have more leeway in SEO, because they have so many backlinks.

To answer your first question, is it self competition to include target keywords from other pages on the home page, the answer is no, it's fine to have a target keyword on multiple pages on your site. But you shouldn't target two pages for the same keyword. For example, if all you sell is books, don't target your home page for the word "books" and have a category page for books. Then, if someone searches for "books," search engines don't know which page to display, and both of your pages will rank lower.

The bigger question, how do you optimize a home page, is trickier to answer. SEO isn't an exact science, and there are tons of ways that you can effectively optimize your homepage. Generally, I would say that your homepage should be targeting your brand name as a keyword, and include text about all of your types of products, and links to category pages. But your homepage is a representation of your company, so I can't really answer that question over Q&A.

Hope this helps!

Kristina

Hi,

I would recommend using the format [Page h1] | Soobumim Photography. For your example, the title would be Chicago Cubs at Huston Astros MLB | Soobumim Photography.

Wordpress has a lot of options for SEO, so I'm sure that there's some way you can set up the page title to follow that format. I don't use the Yoast plugin, but I found a discussion about putting the page title in here: http://wordpress.org/support/topic/seo-yoast-plugin-duplicate-page-title

Hope this helps,

Kristina

Nope, sorry, I wasn't very specific about when you add +New Property. When you're at the highest level, click on the account that you want to add the main domain and subdomain tracking to, and the next level down should have a button that says +New Property.

I believe that you'll have to have two codes on your site, since they're slightly different. If anyone knows a way to just have one code but track on multiple properties, chime in!

Hi Ty,

Google recommends that you keep your original profile for the main site running and create a separate profile for the combined main domain and subdomain tracking, so to get things going, you should:

1. Go under "Admin," like you had seen before
2. Click +New Property
3. Fill out the setup information (name it something that'll remind you that you're combining the main domain and subdomain here
4. Then choose select "one domain with multiple subdomains" for the tracking code.

The, yes, you're going to put that code on both the subdomain and the main domain pages.

The filter is to distinguish between the main domain and subdomains while you're in Google Analytics. GA only reports everything after the domain, so if you have two pages, www.main-site.com/page1/ and subdomain.main-site.com/page1/, they're going to be reported as /page1/, and their data will be combined.

http://www.bigdaylight.com/analytics/filtering-subdomains-in-google-analytics/ tells you how to set up a filter to distinguish between the two:

1. Select “Add new Filter for Profile”
2. Filter Name: “Show Full URLs” (or your own description)
3. Filter Type: Custom Filter
4. Select “Advanced”
5. Field A -> Extract A:
Select “Hostname” from the drop down.
Enter (.*) in the text box.
6. Field B -> Extract B:
Select “Request URL” from the drop down.
Enter (.*) in the text box.
7. Output to Constructor:
Select “Request URL” from the drop down.
Enter $A1$B1 in the text box.
8. Field A Required: Yes
Field B Required: No
Override Output Field: Yes
Case Sensitive: No

After that, you should be set.

Hi Taysir,

It's not a simple process, and you're going to have to modify your GA code on your subdomain pages for it to work. Google has the instructions here: https://support.google.com/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55524.

Let us know if you have problems with any of Google's steps,

Kristina

Is it possible that you had the Google Analytics JavaScript code loading on those redirect pages before they actually redirected? Then you would have had inflated pageviews, since you'd get a count for the first URL and a count for the second.

Hi Carl,

What issues have you addressed since using SEOmoz? And what web analytics program are you using?

Kristina

It's generally best practice to connect localized versions of your site with links in the header rather than redirects of any kind. Redirects tell search engines that only one of the pages should be indexed. A link indicates that both pages are important, and both should be indexed. My guess is that you'd like to have the English version of your site rank in America, and the Dutch version of your site rank in the Netherlands.

If you're worried that visitors will come to your site and get lost because there's just a small link in the header, you could create a pop up that says something like, "I see you're in the Netherlands, want to see our Dutch site?"

As an added bonus, when your American customers visit the Netherlands, they'll still be able to visit the American version of your site, since it's their choice.

Yep, that'll work!

Hi Pat,

You're right on track: you should get those long tail optimized landing pages indexed by linking to them from your already-indexed webpages and by submitting an XML sitemap to Google and Bing. And, of course, external links are a plus in any situation.

A few things to keep in mind:

• Those internal links should use the long tail keywords you're targeting as the linking text
• Make sure to fit these new pages into the existing URL structure, but don't add too many subdirectories. If you use the URL www.website.com/folder1/folder2/folder3/folder4/long-tail-keyword, the keyword in the URL won't be nearly as helpful for rankings.
• It might help to submit a sitemap to Google that only includes those long tail keywords. Google Webmaster Tools will give you the number of URLs in your sitemap and the number of those URLs that are indexed but won't specifically tell you which URLs aren't indexed. If you submit a sitemap with just long tail keyword pages, you'll be able to quickly see approximately how many of your long tail optimized pages are indexed.

Good luck!

Kristina

That's what I'd do. Just make sure to set up a 301 redirect from all of those pages to the homepage, so you don't lose any visitors with the change.

Well, I can see that competition for "price drop alerts" is just slightly outranking you, so it's possible that as you or one of your competitors gains or loses a link, rankings are reshuffled, pulling you on and off of the page.

If that's the case, increasing your back links will help keep you at the top.

Hopefully someone else on this forum has had this problem and will be able to give you more specific advice, though!

Ouch. Could you give us an example of one of the keywords that you're seeing these weird ranking issues with?

Is your search traffic increasing when you see your site ranking and decreasing when you don't?

I agree with Irving - you probably want to let Google reindex all of those 301 links, so you might not have a problem at all in a couple of weeks.

It's also possible that "low glycemic foods" is easier to rank for than "low glycemic diet." If you search for "low glycemic foods" in Google, most of the top 10 search results don't actually have that phrase in their page titles or URLs. Since you did, you would have ranked well in comparison. If you search for "low glycemic diet," you can see that the first 6 results (in my personalized view) have the exact phrase "low glycemic diet" in their page title. That's going to make it harder for you to compete with them.

I checked on the search traffic for "low glycemic foods" vs. "low glycemic diet" and found that "low glycemic foods" gets more searches per month than "low glycemic diet." I know that you feel that "low glycemic diet" is more appropriate for your site, but if it's easier to rank for "low glycemic foods" and there are more people searching for "low glycemic foods," I would stick with your original URL.

Hi Frank,

I would change the page titles to:

Tommeys Mardi Gras | [letter] | [page #]

For example, http://www.toomeys-mardigras.com/products_map.php?symb=C&page=4's page title would be:

Tommeys Mardi Gras | C | 4

That'll at least make them different, and show the structure of your site better. Generally, you want the page title first, then the brand, but since most people aren't going to search for the letter C, I put those last.

But, in general, it's probably better not to have massive indexes like this on your site. The category pages are much better for search engine optimization, and when you have both category pages and alphabetical lists, you're duplicating that content.

Hi Frank,

I think that the link you shared is locked for you personally. Do you mind sharing your website URL so we can look it up in Open Site Explorer ourselves?

Google doesn't penalize for duplicate content per se, but it'll generally hurt your rankings:

• If your issue is that you have identical pages with different URLs, leading to duplicate page titles, your link building efforts are going to be split. Google will only rank one of your duplicate pages on its results page, and that page will be weaker because some backlinks go to the duplicate.
• If the issue is that you have different pages that happen to have the same title, both could rank, but the pages won't be easily distinguishable from each other on the results page. It's much better to have a unique page title so that searchers can see what they're going to get from your page.

Hope this helps,

Kristina

There are too many sites out there for Google to define quality by how well the domain matches the search term, so Google also looks at the quality and number of external links a site is getting. (Yes, this is somewhat circular: you want to get links from sites that get a lot of links themselves.) Google refers to this sort of quality as PageRank.

Since no external websites are linking to clearstackingbins.com, it looks like a low quality site to Google. Plus, it only has one page, and that page only has external links, which will make it pretty clear to Google that it's a page set up as a portal to plasticstorage.com, with no value of its own. Google will see that as a low quality site.

Hi,

It's definitely possible that Google will penalize your site for launching low quality exact match domains pointing towards your site, especially since they released Penguin. Penguin has lowered the boost you get from exact match domains and is penalizing sites that get too much traffic from domains that don't seem legitimate (like this one).

I, personally, wouldn't go with this strategy. My guess is that Penguin is just the first step of many from Google to crack down on SEO maneuvers like this one.

Kristina

Hi Jon,

You should 301 redirect (you should rarely to never 302 redirect) all vanity URLs to the URL that you want to rank organically.

A 302 redirect is a temporary one, so it's telling search engines that the vanity URL is the real URL for the page, but it's under construction/temporarily broken/being revamped, so you have to send visitors to another page, just for now. A 301 redirect tells search engines that the vanity URL is just a vanity URL and that the search engine should index the URL that the vanity URL is leading to.

SEOmoz has a pretty good explanation of it all: http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/redirection.

Best,

Kristina